


the horizon is all we have

by Teaotter



Category: Dirty Computer - Janelle Monáe (Emotion Picture)
Genre: Gen, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-16 13:27:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18095195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teaotter/pseuds/Teaotter
Summary: Looking back, the part that stuck with Denise the most: she just stood there. Like a good girl, like a smart girl, when they came to take her brother away, she did nothing.





	the horizon is all we have

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Many thanks to Morbane, for responding to my plea for beta help, then pointing out where the problems were and helping me sort through what was working and what wasn't. This story is a million times better because of you! All remaining problems, as always, are my own damned fault.

Denise lets herself in quietly, dropping her bag gently on the floor by the door and shedding her shoes. She doesn’t flip on the light; it’s a tiny room, and there’s nothing to trip over. The only furniture they have is a hot plate and a pair of mattresses pushed up along the far wall. If she’s lucky, she won’t wake Danny up, and they can have the fight in the morning.

"There’s tea." His voice is tight and angry and wide-awake.

Not lucky, then. 

Denise can just make out the rumpled shape of him under the blankets, the shadow of his dark hair where he’s turned to face the wall. At least he’s still sleeping with his head at the end nearest her mattress; he’s not angry enough to treat her like a stranger.

"Thanks."

He doesn't say anything else. The silence stretches uncomfortably while she slides out of her jacket and sips at the -- now air-cool -- chamomile tea he'd left for her. He put it in the chipped old mug that both of them hate, but they need a third mug sometimes and Danny doesn't like it when Denise throws things out. They have matching mugs, twins like they are, for the times when everything is good. She wonders how many nights he's made tea, waiting for her.

She drinks the tea from its mis-matched mug, a small penance for leaving her brother alone for a week without word.

She wants to tell him that she's sorry, or at least that she’s safe now. But both of those things are lies, and Danny knows it as well as she does. So there’s nothing to say, unless she wants to start a fight just to clear the air. 

Instead, she kicks out of her jeans and shuffles over onto her own mattress. Sooner or later, the chamomile and exhaustion will win out over the adrenaline from sneaking back into the city, and she'll be able to sleep.

She's still awake when Danny stretches his arm over the gap between them to rest next to her on the pillow. She traces, softly, the ring of stars around the warmth of his wrist, the deep black lines of his tattoo raised just enough to read in the blinding dark. Danny huffs out a quiet laugh, and Denise feels something in the pit of her stomach finally relax.

They'll be okay.

[*****]

Denise was the quiet one when they were growing up: studious, responsible, careful. Danny was the wild child, sneaking out of the house to go to parties and listen to bands Denise had never even heard of. She covered for him, of course; even on the night he missed their mother’s award ceremony and Denise found herself telling every single person who asked that her twin had the stomach flu.

"Mama is so mad at you," she'd whispered as he scrambled from the tree outside into her bedroom window. "You were supposed to be back before we got home."

"It was just a stupid company thing. It's not like it matters." Danny took off his shoes and climbed onto the bed beside her, his jacket still cool from the night air. "Besides, things took longer than I expected."

"What things?"

Danny grinned and pulled up his sleeve, proudly presenting her with a neatly bandaged wrist. "I got a tattoo."

Denise stared at his arm, a sense of deep unease moving through her. It wasn’t even on his shoulder. "How are you supposed to hide that?"

"I'm not going to hide it." And Danny snorted out a laugh, as if her concerns were silly. "That's the whole point."

They weren’t silly. "Everyone's going to know."

Danny stared at her, hard, and for the first time in her life, Denise couldn’t tell what he was thinking. "I want them to know."

She hadn’t been able to explain, even to herself, the strange brittle anger that had swept over her. His rebelliousness was supposed to be a game, one he’d stop playing once they got a little older. Of course he’d go to school, get a job, be respectable… because that was the life she’d mapped out for herself. It had never occurred to her that he wasn't planning to travel that road with her.

All she'd known at the time was a deep sense of betrayal.

[*****]

Danny has already gone out and come back by the time Denise wakes up the next morning. Sunlight streams through the grimy windows, and the comforting smell of the congee he'd bought from the stand around the corner spreads through their little room like a memory of Sunday mornings before church.

Denise is pretty sure that her brother doesn't remember any of those things, certainly not with the clarity she does. But he still gravitates toward the foods he used to love.

Danny dumps half the congee into their one pot and pushes it in her direction, slurping his own directly from the plastic container. She moves over to sit cross-legged next to him on the floor, knees bumping as she grabs a spoon. 

"I've got a shift with Vera's crew tonight. Warehouse on Stanton."

Denise ducks her head. She hadn’t thought it was time yet.

Vera’s a monitor for the House; everyone knows it. The release program rotates all the subjects through his crew once a month, so he can keep an eye on them. But it had only been a couple of weeks since the last time Danny was called in, hadn’t it?

When she looks back up, Danny has his hand on her shoulder. "It’ll be okay. I’ll just put in my headphones and get the cleaning done. We don’t talk much."

Denise swallows hard against the lump in her throat. "They’ll ask you --"

"And I won’t tell them anything." His face breaks into the beatific smile that haunts her nightmares. "Everything is great. I have a little room by myself. I like when things are quiet."

Denise makes a wordless noise and grabs his arm. His face clears instantly. "It's okay! I'm just pretending."

"Danny. We should leave town." She's said it before, but she keeps hoping --

"I can’t."

"There are people in Vegas." She knows she’s begging. So does he. "They can get us new IDs, we can start over --"

Danny just shakes his head, and says, softly, "I’ve already had to start over. I can't do it again. You know I can't."

Denise closes her eyes and leans into him, holding on as tight as she can.

[*****]

She wasn’t supposed to see it.

Denise had been running every morning that summer: down the street, around the forest park trail, and back in about an hour. It got her out of the house during the worst of the arguments, Danny and Mama going back and forth about where he’s been this time, what he was doing all night, who he’s been seeing. They’d start up first thing in the morning and end when Danny stormed out of the house to crash… somewhere else.

He’d stopped telling Denise where he was going.

That morning, Denise had gone out as usual, the summer sun burning hot on the back of her neck. But she’d forgotten her water bottle and circled back around through the neighborhood to the house. She was halfway down the block when she saw them.

Denise froze.

Three men in black police gear were wrestling her brother into the back of a big van at the end of their driveway. Danny was thrashing around, trying to break free; they dragged him the last few feet. Mama followed along behind them.

She wasn’t trying to stop them.

Denise couldn’t understand most of the yelling, she thought Danny was just cursing, but clear as a bell she heard Mama say "It’s for your own good!" like a line from a stupid movie.

Looking back, the part that stuck with her the most: she just stood there. Like a good girl, like a smart girl, when they came to take her brother away, she did _nothing_. She let them do it.

Mama paid them before they drove off.

By the time Denise unfroze enough to go home, the house was empty. That night at dinner, Mama told her that Danny had finally volunteered to check himself into a rehab center. Denise pretended to believe her.

Danny never came back.

[*****]

She can’t stay in the apartment after he leaves that evening.

Denise waits at a rickety table in an unfamiliar noodle shop on Fifteenth and watches the sun go down. The shadows of old office towers march inexorably down the streets even as the last reflections of red and gold light glitter in the upper windows like fireworks.

A screen in the corner repeats the local news broadcasts over and over again. A high school band won a contest. Pet adoptions are at an all-time high. There was a warehouse fire four nights ago: an accident, and no one was hurt. Footage of fire hoses and blackened walls flit across the screen and disappear into the weather report.

There's no mention of the chemical plant in Arizona, despite the thick plume of black smoke that lingered all day while Denise and one of the other girls hid in an old motel in the desert. They’d gotten separated from the rest of the crew; Denise still doesn’t know if anyone else made it out. It’ll be weeks before messages get passed all the way back here, weeks of not knowing whether the worst has already happened.

[*****]

When she can’t stand the waiting any more, Denise makes her way downtown. The high-rise on Fourteenth has a human security guard instead of an iris scanner -- the only thing she really cared about when picking the apartment -- and she waves vaguely at them on her way to the elevator.

Coming here is like stepping into a memory of someone she used to be: brightly abstract art on the walls, shelves filled with actual books, an entire wall in her bedroom devoted to shoes. She’s never actually lived here. It feels emptier than Danny’s room on the other side of town.

The cleaning service keeps the place spotless, no layers of dust to show how long it’s been between visits. 

She takes a shower and changes into one of the dozen bland outfits she keeps lined up in the closet. In the mirror, she looks tired, but makeup can cover the worst of that. She checks her image again, and tries smiling. It takes her a few minutes and a glass of wine to make it look right -- dutiful, responsible, _normal_.

She takes the wine with her to the kitchen and calls her mother.

"Denise, dear!" Her mother smiles at her from the video screen, the sparkling lights of the garden patio behind her, a wineglass on the table beside her. "It’s so good to hear from you. How’s the book coming?"

Denise takes a deep breath and spins another story about the architectural history she’ll never actually write. She had to give some explanation for upending her life and moving here; she’s not sure what to do when that excuse wears thin.

But she does manage to turn the conversation back to her mother and the company.

"It’s always something, isn’t it?" Her mother sighs dramatically and takes another sip of wine. "There was some kind of mix-up in the supply chain, and everyone’s orders are suddenly running weeks behind. Of course, no one tells me this until it’s an emergency, but I think I have our clients calmed down for the moment."

Denise smiles for the camera, the one she practiced. "That’s because you’re good at your job, Mama."

She dodges the usual hint that she should fly back some time for a visit, and keeps the rest to small talk about the weather until she can get off the phone. Then she pours herself a second glass of wine and downs it, chasing the chill of the conversation with the alcoholic burn.

It doesn’t calm her nerves. Neither does changing back into her own clothes and leaving that apartment, though it helps. 

She’s running out of time; if she can’t talk Danny into leaving, at some point all of this comes crashing down around them. She doesn’t know if she can leave him, even if the alternative is worse for both of them. It gets harder and harder each time to slip back into those clothes, those smiles.

But in the meantime, at least she can pass along the news. ‘Weeks behind’ on orders of Nevermind -- she’s never heard that before. They’ve been hitting warehouses and chemical plants for two years now; maybe it’s starting to make a difference.

She just doesn’t know if it’ll be enough.

[*****]

Denise wakes up when the door opens, her heart pounding, but it's just Danny shuffling in as quietly as he can. Relief leaves her breathless. She listens to him move around the dark room, toeing off his shoes, finding the tea she left for him. She must've fallen back asleep, because the next thing she hears is his mattress springs creaking as he gets into bed. She wrinkles her nose at the sharp chemical tang that still clings to his hair.

"Hey," she says softly. 

Danny sighs and reaches out for her hand. "You didn't go out."

She knows what he means. "Not tonight. Maybe not for a while."

He doesn’t say anything for a long time, just twines his fingers around hers. "I keep thinking you won’t be here when I get home. Some day, you won’t come back. And I don't know what I'll do." 

Denise thinks about herself, frozen in place the day they took him; how she couldn’t have imagined, then, how far she was willing to go.

"It’ll be okay," she says now, holding his hand in the dark. "Whatever happens, it’ll be okay. I’ll always come back to you."


End file.
